Jonathon Blake wrote:
I might have customized my keyboard shortcuts.
Go ">Format >Styles >Catalog"
That menu option has been dropped from 2.0.
I can come up with many examples where styles don't work for me or other
people I work with.
I have yet to see an example of where styles do not work. <snip>
We should distinguish here between Styles as a concept and Writer's
implementation of Styles.
For instance: How exactly do you create an in line heading in Writer?
Something that looks like this:
3. *History* The history of the Andalusian people...
where the word "History" is treated *as* a Heading in all respects; it
is automatically populated into a TOC, it shows up in the Navigator, it
is properly affected by the Numbering formats, etc.
Answer: You can't do it; at least not in Writer. And this isn't a
trivial example. It's specified as either the 3rd or 4th level heading
in APA format and probably in MLA as well, so the deficiency potentially
affects almost anyone using OOo in academic work.
The other major deficiency in Writer's styles is the inability to affect
a relative change, a change in one attribute without affecting anything
else. So if you have a document that uses more than one font, you have
make duplicates of things like an Emphasis character style for each font
or point size. That's a big reason why people use direct formatting
rather than character styles; character styles often do /too/ much.
That's also the reason why you have thousands of Styles in your
template. Undoubtedly, you have dozens of styles that are identical save
for the language setting. With a concept of relative styling or layered
styling or whatever you want to call it, you could reduce that number to
something on the order of the square root of what you have now, without
losing any stylistic functionality or consistency.
Wordperfect styles are really a form of Autotext, so a style definition
can include the insertion of boilerplate text, fields, variables, even
things like tables. It's a bit messier, and more prone to errors,
particularly when several different people have touched a document, but
it is also much more powerful and flexible. You aren't limited to
whatever the program designers happened to imagine when they coded the
thing. If you can create it manually, you can turn it into a style. The
same can't be said for Writer or Word.
So I would tread carefully and not be so dismissive of Wordperfect and
its adherents. It's powerful software and it has retained a loyal
following for good reason.
--
Rod
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